


Like Reindeer Do

by ThisAintBC



Category: due South
Genre: Angst and Feels, But also, F/M, Family Fluff, Found Family Elements, Gen, Happy Ending, M/M, POV Outsider, Ray Vecchio's past relationships, because it's 2020 and we deserve it, references to canonical domestic violence, the Vecchio house, this fic sees your bowling alley but chooses not to acknowledge it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:47:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28123335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisAintBC/pseuds/ThisAintBC
Summary: The first time her son brings a boy home, he isn’t her son at all.A series of relationships in the Vecchio house.
Relationships: Benton Fraser & Ray Vecchio, Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski, Ray Kowalski & Ray Vecchio, Ray Vecchio & Ma Vecchio, Stella Kowalski/Ray Vecchio
Comments: 18
Kudos: 41
Collections: due South Seekrit Santa 2020





	Like Reindeer Do

**Author's Note:**

  * For [juniperberry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/juniperberry/gifts).



> Warning: there's a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to potential homophobia on RayK's parents' part.

The first girl her son brings home - and she feels a soft twinge of shame in her gut when she realizes she’s forgotten her name - is quiet and calm, with soft brown hair hanging in a cloud of static.

“She’s just a friend, Ma,” he complained, but she sees the way he holds her hand under the table and can’t quite hide her grin.

After dinner he takes her upstairs and they hide away in his room to study. Laughter echoes down the hallway, and she isn’t surprised to find the girl at her dinner table again the next day. One night turns into two turns into five, and soon enough almost every night she finds herself interrupting the quiet giggling to drive the girl home before Ray’s father drags in. The girl lasts only two months before Ray locks himself away alone one evening and emerges the next day to announce that basketball is better than girls anyway, but the improvement in his grades is, thankfully, permanent.

The second girl is everything the first wasn’t: loud and angry and tall. She’s just as hotheaded as Ray and twice as rebellious, and when she flings a plate of spaghetti across the room three weeks in she can’t even say she’s surprised.

“Are you alright?” She asks her son through the sudden, choking silence, but his frozen eyes never leave his girlfriend even as he stumbles out a “Fine, Ma.”

She stands, and wordlessly walks around the table to pick up the shattered plate and scrub at tomato sauce. That night, after the dust has settled and everyone has scattered off into their own foxholes, she sits down on her son’s bed and holds out her arms, pretends she doesn’t notice him sobbing into her shoulder. _Never again,_ she thinks, but some promises can’t be kept, and when she hears a shout of her name and an angry footstep on the stairs she knows it was better not to make a bargain she can’t hold up her end of.

A parade of girls passes through after that, some friends and some not, but none of them sit at her dinner table and pass warm secrets alongside dinner rolls until Anne quirks an eyebrow at him from across the table as she folds her hands in exasperated prayer. She challenges and calls out her son, but never shouts and never sneers, and he glows under her attention. She’s surprised how long Anne lets him hold her hand driving too fast down the interstate, but eventually her intuition proves true and Anne figures out that she has better things than boys on her mind.

Irene Zuko never sits at her table, but her shadow haunts an empty chair never brought in from the hall. Ray sits quiet and angry some nights and doesn’t show up at all on others, and the rising tide of fear that her son will go down the same path as her husband never completely goes away after that, even long after the doubt has turned to guilt.

Angie sits in her living room and tells her she won’t let Ray go for anything small, and she feels a sense of relief that after everything he can still have this. It doesn’t last - problems arise, as problems tend to do, but she can’t say that Angie didn’t live up to her word. She can’t even really blame her when she welcomes her son, ringless and downtrodden, back into her home on a sunny April day. And there he stays, until one day he comes home as someone else.

The first time her son brings a boy home - properly brings a boy home to sit at her table and receive her judgment, not just a friend over for a meal or a game - he isn’t her son at all. Benton Fraser is a beautiful man, kind and upright with a steady paycheck, and she always had hopes that he would become her son in a more formal sense. Peroxide blonde and a rattling, swearing mouth wouldn’t have been what she predicted, but she thinks she deserves credit for adjusting course relatively smoothly when the Ray who is and isn’t hers announces his intentions in front of her best carbonara. Benton doesn’t fare quite so well, blushing and clearing his throat so loudly she worries for his vocal chords. But he ducks his head and reaches across the table with a quiet, awed _Ray_ , and she beams as she serves up dessert. Ray’s slice of pie is extra large, she explains to an indignant Tony, as a reward for courage. He grins slyly at her around a forkful of apples and ice cream, and she offers him a wink in response.

Benton is flustered but pleased when he is also graced with a larger slice of pie. Tony snorts, but Maria whacks his arm and hisses at him, and after dinner he invites them out to see his new car, so peace reigns after all.

Her son, when he returns home, does not seem to agree.

“Ma,” he all but whines, “how could you support this? Look at him! He’s so–” he makes a disgusted noise. She keeps quiet as she offers him cream for his coffee. He shakes his head, reaching a hand out for it - too slow, and she’s already turned back toward the fridge. If he asked she’d say because he shook his head, but he won’t ask and they both know better. “Benny could do so much better than some punk who can’t even tie his shoes! And he’s always badgering him. _Do this, do that_. Fraser doesn’t need someone to tell him what to do!”

“Isn’t that what you’re doing?” She asks mildly, and her son grumbles into his coffee but drops it. Just for then, she knows - he’s wrong, but his heart is in the right place and she caught the hurt that flickered through hunched shoulders when Frannie first let it slip.

Ray, the other Ray, doesn’t stop coming to dinner once he’s back in Chicago. The sniping across her table is an expected battle, she can tell, and she sees how he settles into a rhythm of it. His smiles are all teeth, but he comes back week after week to settle scores across a battlefield of pasta and green beans.

“Leave him be,” she chastises as she shepherds her son through his now weekly punishment duty of washing dishes.

“Ma,” he says, childish like when Maria broke his favorite action figure, “Benny’s my best friend. I can’t just stand by and let him hurt himself again.”

Her heart aches for her boy, for his loyalty and kindness and responsibility, but there’s another boy balanced in one of her trees whose eyes flash every time the topic of Christmas or doughnuts or cars or pierogies comes up.

“Don’t carry water for a ghost,” she chides, and stops herself from soothing away the anger that floods his face.

“I’m not,” he snaps, but he hesitates before he pushes himself away from the counter and stomps out into the yard. She watches as he careens into the other Ray, who looks down at him with a mouth full of nails and doesn’t stop swinging his hammer until he hits his own fingers. He eventually spits the nails down into the grass so he can shout back, and soon enough swings down after. She can’t help but sigh fondly when she catches the annoyance on both of their faces when Frannie finally drives them apart. The treehouse will have to wait.

Things come to a head, as they so often do, over her Sunday roast.

“Ma, aren’t you going to stop this?” Frannie complains, peering around out of the kitchen.

“No,” she says calmly, but can’t stop the way her spine instinctively stiffens when something shatters. Ray has come a long way from the half-thawed boy who helped her scrub and scrub and scrub until all that was left of the tomato sauce was a patch of stained wallpaper, but the rhythm of the fight has been broken and their angry words peter out.

Long after things have gone quiet, she walks in and looks from the mostly-set table to the glass scattered across the floor. One look at her son’s twisted face tells her all she needs to know about fault and blame, and so she turns around and comes back with a dustpan and a broom. They look at her with such identically young, shamed expressions that all she can manage of the speech she intended to give them is a nod. They snipe softly at each other as they clean, and Ray flees upstairs as soon as Ray mentions leaving, but not one word is about Stella or Fraser.

Standing in her driveway in the fading daylight, she pulls a startled Ray into as big of a hug as she can manage. _Don’t hurt my son_ , she thinks, and _don’t let him hurt you_ , but all she says is “Stop breaking my dishes.”

He huffs a damp laugh into her shoulder and agrees, and she remembers another boy, on another night, and wonders what her son’s occupation has brought her to.

The first time they come in with their shoulders knocking together, teasing without the bitter edges of loneliness, she holds her breath all through dinner.

“Great potatoes, Ma,” her son says, his charm out in full force.

“Delicious, Mrs. Vecchio,” her other Ray agrees - or she thinks he does, but given the potato in his mouth it’s hard to be sure. They glare at each other for a moment, but she feels herself finally relax when the daggers ease into matching smirks.

“Cheesecake?” she offers, and they squabble agreeably over who gets the larger piece. They whisper back and forth to each other like boys plotting mischief, and after they’ve wandered out into the yard she isn’t surprised to see Ray stick a phone in Ray’s face. From his gobsmacked look, she can guess who it is.

“Your Ray is doing just fine,” she assures Fraser over a crackly phone line that night, and lets him warm himself on her stories of treehouses and fast cars and cheesecake. “You should call him,” she finishes, “before Ray calls you.”

Fraser thanks her earnestly, and she wonders if his next phone call will gain or lose her a plate on her table.

The last girl her son brings home is short, blonde, polite until she’s not, and whip-smart. Two glasses of chardonnay in she starts needling at the Ray who is and is not hers, who gives as good as he gets; four glasses in, leaning against the counter as Ray washes dishes, she jabs her finger right under his nose.

“Your friend,” she says, confident and angry, “had better treat him right. No, you had your say,” she slaps her hand over Ray’s mouth when he starts to open it, “you told him! You told him to be good, and that he wasn’t good enough, and that he should try anyways. And normally I would agree with you,” she emphasizes, and then turns sly, “but you know a secret? I fucking hate your best friend, Ray. I hate him. He is irritating and overconfident and cocksure, and I know Ray, I know he buys into that bullshit, and if he uses it to hurt him I swear to God I will fly to Canada myself and you will help me, Ray, you will help me drag his corpse out onto the tundra for his stupid goddamn wolf to eat.”

Ray is staring at her, a kind of awe on his face that she didn’t want to know her son was capable of, but as much as she wants to leave her forgotten post in the doorway she needs to hear his answer.

“...okay,” he finally agrees, “Okay, Stella.”

“You tell him!” She argues, not finished and obviously annoyed. “You tell him that I said that. Every word of it, Ray.”

“I’ll tell him,” he agrees softly, and brushes Stella’s bangs back with soapy hands. As he leans in, she turns away from her son and his fiancée, content to finally make herself scarce. The sunlight reflecting off the snow plow pile blocking her driveway is the only thing making her eyes water, she tells herself, and if she was twenty years younger she might even have believed it.

She sits at her table, alone for once in her quiet, empty house, and sinks into the warmth of a cup of coffee. An album’s worth of pictures line the table, and as Bing Crosby croons about silver bells she chuckles down at Stella, winking at her from some sandy beach, and Ray, standing triumphant on a snowy peak, and Frannie, curled around her newborn daughter.

“We made it,” she tells her son’s photo fondly, exchanging beams with a 20 something fresh out of the police academy. Midnight mass isn’t for the faint of heart, especially not the next morning, and she has a full day’s work ahead of her - but the coffee is still piping hot and outside the neighbor’s inflatable Santa is a flashing red and white strobe, so she indulges herself for a few more minutes.

A car horn beeps frantically outside. “Ma!” Frannie shouts. “Come help me with the kids!”

She pushes herself up and goes to open the door. “Come on, Francesca, let’s go! Those pies aren’t going to bake themselves!” She calls, fondly impatient as her daughter leans through the open sliding door into a full, riotous van.

Her grandchildren are every bit the handful their mother was, singing and kicking and dancing in their seats, too excited about Santa and presents to worry about small details like seatbelts and carseats. But Ray and Fraser’s plane lands at three, which means Ray and Stella, not to be outdone, will be here at two - and if they’re going to keep Stella away from the oven and avoid repeating the Thanksgiving Disaster of ‘02 they’re going to need to get cracking. A smiling face waves enthusiastically at her through the van window, and she makes up her mind to help Frannie restore some kind of order - just this once, just long enough to get everyone in the house, she tells herself, but her heart isn’t in it and she knows it will be the same again next Christmas.

And so she steps out into the pre-dawn air, robe tucked firmly around her, and lets her granddaughter’s beaming grin carry her worn slippers all the way down to the street.

**Author's Note:**

> Juniperberry, I hope you enjoyed this! I kind of took a couple of your prompts, mashed them up together, & ran with them. It ended up leaning a little more gen than most of your prompts were, but I hope you like it anyways! <3
> 
> Thanks as always to my excellent, supportive beta, zombiecheerios! Without her this would be a much worse fic, and the ending in particular is much better off for her help puzzling it out.
> 
> Thanks as well to ride, who caught a couple eleventh hour SPAG issues and gave me a quick head's up!


End file.
